Conversations

'Intern' Magazine Expands Dialogue on Unpaid Work Experience

Few topics affecting those new to the work force have been more unproductively addressed than unpaid internships. That is, until recently, when Eric Glatt and Alex Footman, two production interns from the set of Black Swan won a lawsuit against Fox Searchlight in which they defended their right to receive pay for their work. The Black Swan case was not only a victory for Glatt and Footman but for all people interning in creative industries who aren't receiving compensation for their time and effort.

Not all of the discourse around unpaid internships needs to be so black and white, though. There are businesses so young that they simply can't afford to pay their interns monetarily. In these cases, it's possible for companies to give back without offering their young workers cash compensation but providing them with the space to create work that they can use when they graduate from their internships (e.g., giving writers opportunities for clips at a media site, or offering teams of designers the chance to test out working in a collective).

intern — a new print magazine founded by Manchester-based photographer and all-around creative Alec Dudson — seeks to broaden the discussion around unpaid internships by generating content for interns, about interns. It's not that Dudson believes unpaid internships are inherently wrong. He had his first magazine internship in 2011, and has worked at several publications in the UK and throughout Europe since then. In fact, he probably gained some of his best experience working as an unpaid intern, and his magazine project was born of that experience.

"I started toying with the idea during my last internship in London, at Boat Magazine," Dudson told Mashable. He began working seriously — planning content and recruiting editors — in January and has been working on getting the magazine off the ground ever since.

Perhaps the most essential move Dudson made to increase intern's visibility was reaching out to Stack — an independent magazine subscription service which selects publications from around the world and mails them to subscribers' doors every month — and asking if they would be interested in including his magazine in a mail-out. They were.

Issue zero of intern magazine. Image: Alec Dudson

Through Stack, "1,300 copies of [intern's] issue zero newspaper were delivered to the homes of people who, by proxy, were really into indie magazines," Dudson said. The circulation of an issue that explained the magazine's mission gave the project momentum, and Dudson decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to really get intern on its feet.

Dudson told us that he "hadn't heard anything about Kickstarter until [his] internship with Domus," an architecture magazine based in Milan. So far, crowdfunding seems to be serving him well; intern's campaign still has two-and-a-half weeks left, and Dudson is nearly 80% of the way to reaching his funding goal.

intern has the look of an avant-garde fashion magazine, which makes sense, given its intended audience. "The aesthetic is tailored to appealing to the design- and fashion-aware audiences that creatives generally are," Dudson said. "There are a lot of people from different industries that it seems to resonate with."

A photography spread from issue zero of intern. Image: Alec Dudson

"We're kind of backed up by the fact that creative industries have always trusted in physical, tactile things," Dudson said, when we asked how he felt about venturing into print publishing in a time when many would say it's a declining medium.

That's not to say he's opposed to online publishing. Dudson sees design elements bleeding into digital publications increasingly and cited Pitchfork's recent Daft Punk feature as one example of this phenomenon. However, he believes that the decisions that go into creating a print publication — selecting paper and ink as well as the sensory experience of holding and smelling a recently-printed magazine — are critical to designers and difficult to replicate online.

While intern's aesthetics are crucial to its brand, the magazine's primary goal is not to glamorize creative internships but to invite discussion about them.

"For me, anything that is an internship should be focused on a back-and-forth relationship," Dudson explained — one in which "the employer is gaining as much [from the ]internship as the intern himself."

intern's purpose is to inspire "debate to make the whole discussion of internships across the board far more frank and overt," he said. "If we can achieve that then the pressure will come on various industries" to consider reforming their internship programs to provide more benefits for interns, even if that doesn't necessarily mean paying them.

While he does believe strongly in the capacity for intern to generate discussion, Dudson knows there are much greater forces at work. "This magazine," he said, "isn't a solution of any kind." He hopes that readers will "use this magazine as a platform and argue their case" in the ongoing debate around unpaid internships.

Dudson needs to raise at least £5,500 (about $8300) on Kickstarter to print and distribute 2,000 copies of intern's first issue. If you're an unpaid intern — currently, formerly — or if this is simply a debate you'd like to take part in, you can back the project here.

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